As you may have seen, David's been taking care of OSNews for a few days because I'm quite busy with work. Still, there's one thing I'd like to talk about: the desktop mode in Windows 8. I wish I could've added this to the first impressions article, but I only arrived at this conclusion yesterday: desktop mode in Windows 8 is Microsoft's equivalent of Mac OS X's Classic mode.

Yeah, I would agree that KDE4 represents the most conservative (also, most sane) approach to the desktop right now.

Alas, Win7 is just too popular with the crowd (right now at around 40% of the market share and growing as more and more XP holdouts upgrade their systems) and will keep serving the needs of the ordinary Joes, so I really have a hard time seeing even a 5% exodus from Winworld to Linux.

Sure, MacOS will pick up some Metro refugees but high price barrier will never allow Macs to command any substantial piece of the market.

Remember, Macs don't come with carrier subsidies like iPhones or iPads do, so many people are unable to justify dishing that much cash upfront for a Mac, however user-friendly and works-out-of-the-box it may be (especially in the non-American markets where Macs are insultingly overpriced and almost always 6-9 months behind the US models).

The Mac works-out-of-the-box?! Hardly. It is hostile for foreigners and only works one way, the Steve Jobs way.

Consider that a fully localized Hebrew version of Windows exists since Win98. As far as I know MS has probably the best support for i18n and l13n among professional software. Macs till this day do not properly support Hebrew and require tinkering with 3rd party tools.